How Real Can Dreaming Be?

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Treating my dreamtime as if my computer didn't work out so hot last night, or rather this morning. I sorta didn't get much sleep for trying. When I finally did get to sleep, perchance to dream, the first dream I attempted to manipulate with a pretend mouse evaporated before my very "eyes". No biggie. I got the rest of my life to work this out.

The problem I have with the open lesions on my toes is in full heat presently. It's because of the RA. It's been going on for years and I thought it was athletes foot fungus. Well, it's not. Maybe it's psoriasis. The rheumatologists told me it comes with the arthritis along with other problems. Fairly similar to the side effects of having diabetes. Yet, I don't have any symptoms of diabetes.

Now, I've gotten the same redness showing up on my finger joints that are swollen. The redness hasn't broken out into open lesions as of yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. My family doctor at the Dogwood Clinic over at the Fayetteville VA Hospital prescribed a tub of triamcinolone acetonide cream to use with these lesions. Apparently it has 0.1% steroid of some kind in it. It sorta works.

For the first time I had to decline going out for a walk in the woods at night with my brother. The lesion on the second toe of my left foot is painful to the touch of my shoes, and walking just repeats that touch with each step. I've tried to ignore it and walk on, but that causes the lesion to worsen.

Last night when I was cleaning it to put a new bandage on it, the lesion reacted to the peroxide I sprayed on it, and bubbled up as I like for it to do. That way I know the oxygen indicated by the bubbly foam is killing any bacteria that might be present. I doubt that it help the lesion to heal, but at least it's getting disinfected. These lesions are not a pretty sight. There is nothing very pretty about the aging process. The same thing that keeps you alive reverses its role.

Sometime punctuation drives me nuts. Particularly with apostrophe s ('s). I'm fairly sure of my use of the apostrophe is fairly correct most of the time, but others not. I'm trying to be aware of it to see if I can develop a sense of when to do what, but I still wouldn't get too cocky about being wright. Right?

My friend Billy came by to bring a Christmas gift. A gallon of wine. Right brand, but wrong wine, so he fished out the receipt and told me to go change it if I didn't like it. Such impertinence. As usual, we sat around and talked for a couple of hours. I shamed him into not smoking in my closed room, but only after the first cigarette. I'm like a converted whore about cigarette smoke now.

Billy has been doing a lot more meditation, and I am is about the only-est person he can talk to comfortably about it. There is nothing special about me except that I am is the only other person he knows well that meditates. Since I kind of got him interested I guess I owe him that much.

We've had a conversation going for over twenty years now. A lot of it in the last decade or so has to do with the hypnosis sessions we do. We got into this habit when we worked and roomed together on a construction job down in Marietta, Georgia.

He was nervous about having to take a TIG welding test in order to keep his job. I suggested hypnosis. I guess he was desperate or thought his situation was a good enough excuse to try it, but he quickly agreed and we got down to it. He turned out to be somnambulistically inclined, and could reach the deepest states of hypnosis easily.

Due to his ability to achieve a deep state of somnambulism it was an easy task for me to teach him how to visualize abstract objects. It only took a couple of hours to get him to visualize two silver screens like the ones in movies theaters and get him to project a video-like scene of the best TIG welders he had ever witnessed welding in the right hand screen, and an image of himself in the other screen.

My instructions were for him to get the image of himself in the left screen to behave just like the expert in the right screen. Where upon I left him to this task while I counted aloud from one hundred backward to zero. I wanted him to use my voice as a connection between us, but to use all his other faculties to achieve the good end.

By the time I reached zero he had his answer to the TIG process that had always stumped him. When he was trying to get his body in the left screen to imitate the expert welder's bodily motions in the right screen he noticed the expert do something he had previously ignored in his own efforts to get the necessary perfect results.

Billy told me that he only noticed the expert doing what he did, that did the trick and corrected his welding. was because he had to get his image of himself in the left screen to repeat it. By trying to imitate the expert in every detail with his own body he saw/felt it.

The expert was moving the TIG cup by using his elbow instead of his wrist to roll the cup. We both knew his notice of that one motion was what his problem was. What tickled me was that it was the same reason I had problems back when I was welding pipe. The next day he passed the 100% x-ray test with flying colors.

Helping Billy to pass that welding test on his own merits was a crucial insight for me. The reason for my writing that is based on how I convinced Billy he could actually "see" the objects and behaviors I suggested hypnotically to him.

Our success was based on a day trip we made one weekend while we were working in Marietta to Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Billy had never seen a mountain in his life. It amazed me that a fifty-odd year old Native American Indian had never seen a mountain. When I suggested we go resolve that missing experience he was eager to go.

It was his brand new experience in seeing a real mountain with a national park on top of it that set the scene for our successful hypnosis session with the TIG welding deal. At the entrance to the National Park is a building used by the Army Corps of Engineers as their logo.

The buildings up on Lookout Mountain were the representation of that logo. Two square buildings connect at the top with an arched crossover to a low central building that formed the park entrance below it. Google "Army Corps of Engineers logo", and you can see it for yourself.

The way I got Billy to "see" the twin movies screens in his imagination was to get him to remember seeing those two buildings at the entrance of the National Park on top of Lookout Mountain. That was "real" for him. He had a vivid memory of everything associated with our trip to see his first real mountain.

Even in waking beta consciousness he can recall every aspect of that trip today. He doesn't have to be hypnotized for that. So, when he was in a deep, somnambulistic trance I asked him to pretend his favorite recliner he talks about favorably was sitting in the middle of the street facing those building.

The chair was real to him. He sat in it every day when he was at home. Asking him to pretentiously place in some weird place was not that odd in deep trance. I asked him to sit down in his favorite chair and remember those two buildings with the entrance to the park between them. That part was easy. These objects were like the back of his hand.

When he got comfortably ensconced in his favorite imaginary chair looking at one of has favored memories of a visit to these imagined buildings, the next thing was to ask him to place the movie screens on the two buildings. That was easy for him. What is easy is simple.

After he seemed comfortable sitting in his favorite chair looking at two sanctified holy building grow movie screens at his command, it wasn't really that hard to get him to realize the chair and the movie screens were not a natural part of a real scenario.

The next part was the poser. I asked him to remove himself and his chair and the two movies screens he had generated to fit on the two buildings into outer space, then I took away the chair and left him in the middle of nowhere looking at two movie screens that were only there because he imagined them to be... per my hypnotic suggestion. Then, I woke him up.

The next hypnosis session we did together I asked him if he could "see" the two movie screens in his imagination? To my delight, he seemed insulted for me to think that he couldn't. What did I take him for? A fool? Of course he saw the movie screens. He made them what they are today. '-)

The twin movie screens were a big deal. We didn't stop using them after he passed the welding test. We started putting his real heroes up on that right hand screen. Not the heroes he was supposed to have for the sake of pleasing others, but the real heroes he himself didn't actually know he was a secret admirer of.

There was Mister Peel, an old man in his neighborhood he grew up around. He had always admired the way he was and how compassionate and kind he was to even his debtors and the people who rented property from him. He owned several trailer parks.

Mister Peel died maybe ten years ago. Now, Billy owns all the trailer parks Mister Peel owned, and several more besides. Why would he not? When we put a video of what Billy admired about Mister Peel in the right movies screen and had Billy imitate what he saw in the left screen, when he perfected those moves, I had him leave the left screen and be-co-me Mister Peel in the right screen and they each became the other. No blame.

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